The immersive and interactive virtual environment of Future Delta makes critical scientific data more accessible by providing an active learning process of play and exploration.

Professors Aleksandra Dulic and Hussein Keshani awarded for research projects

Aleksandra Dulic, Future Delta

Dulic, an assistant professor of New Media and the Director for the Centre for Culture and Technology, was awarded a research grant with Stephen Sheppard, a professor of forest resources management at UBC’s Vancouver campus, for their project “Future Delta 2.0, a community-based video game design and evaluation for local climate change action”.

Future Delta is an immersive and interactive virtual environment that acts as a tool for communication between researchers and the public. Combining climate change modeling, socioeconomic scenario analysis and 3D image modeling of real places, the researcher aim to make climate change science and solutions more salient and understandable.

The project brings together climate change science and multimedia interaction in the context of emerging methods of visualisation and community engagement. Through this integrated design process, we have developed an interactive visualization of alternative future climate change scenarios that are focused on the flooding risks of the Delta municipality. For more information visit the Future Delta website.

Hussein Keshani

Hussein Keshani, Model Images

Keshani, assistant professor of Art History and Visual Culture, was awarded a grant for the project “Model Images: Transforming miniature paintings into 3D virtual environments.”

The project will develop 3D computer models of scenes represented in 18th and 19th Century North Indian miniature paintings.

“I am interested in the historical arts and visual cultures of South Asia and the Islamic World,” says Keshani. “Drawing on the disciplinary perspectives of art history, history and religious studies, I study North Indian architecture, epigraphy, miniature paintings, photographs and other works from the Sultanates (11th to 16th C), Mughal (16th to 18th C) and late-Mughal periods in their socio-political contexts.

“Much of the visual cultural heritage I study is either under threat of destruction, understudied or ignored.”

The goal of Model Images is to develop a new method of art historical analysis.

Such research enhances our understanding of the full spectrum of human creativity and the history of South Asia, the Islamic world and its diaspora. But for contemporary polycultural communities in India and Canada anxious about their Muslim minorities, it helps form bridges of understanding. Contemporary Muslim and South Asian communities worldwide also benefit by learning about the diversity of South Asia and the Islamic world’s visual cultural heritage.

Furthermore, advancing knowledge of cultural heritage sites and historical visual culture helps lay the groundwork for conservation and interpretation initiatives and fosters the development of tourism industries.

Topics include the Okanagan, Marlowe and Shakespeare and, yes, Gay Dwarves

Anne Fleming, Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar Press)

Actually there are no dwarves in Gay Dwarves of America, but in the collection of short stories there is a mother of a teen with dwarfism who worries he might be gay, and there’s a parasitologist named Edna who’d rather not hear the words “gay” or “lesbian” but longs for the love of a certain young woman, and a boy on a unicycle — there is always a boy on a unicycle — and a hockey mom in Toronto who pretends to be Swiss. Hut, hut, hut, she shouts in the stands, ringing her cowbell like she was at a ski hill.

There’s a story that’s a musical (numbers include “You Can’t Leave a Man in a Coma” and “The Total Quality Management Waltz”) and a story that’s one family’s puke diary. With a nod to the circus and a wink at the kitchen sink, Gay Dwarves of America is like a mixed tape made by your pirate radio DJ friend who never quite grew up, and who shelters, behind that fun shiny nerdy schtick, the tenderest of tender hearts.

Grisel García Pérez, Training Spanish Speakers to Perceive and Pronounce English Vowels: A Theoretical, Practical Approach (Edwin Mellen Press)

Grisel García Pérez’s book looks at some crucial aspects of learning a foreign language and discusses the methods and results of her experimental research into training native Spanish speakers in a regular classroom setting over a three-week training period.

In the book, García Pérez outlines the work she did to help a group of 32 Spanish speakers identify and produce English pairs of vowels. The results were significant and make an important contribution to the understanding of second-language pronunciation. The book also serves as a guide to instructors on effective pronunciation.

Nancy Holmes, The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (Ronsdale Press)

Nancy Holmes has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems (2012). This collection of poems is about the place, people, plants and animals of the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia where she has lived for the past 20 years.

Sean Lawrence, Forgiving the Gift: The Philosophy of Generosity in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Duquesne University Press)

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.

While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts, but also how we are to live with others in the world.

Marianne Legault,  Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature (Ashgate Publishing)

Marianne Legault’s recently published a book is about literary discourses on female friendship and intimacy in 17th-century French literature.

The book takes as its premise the view that unlike men, women have been denied for centuries the possibility of same-sex friendship. Legault explores the effect of this on female friendship and homoerotic relationships as thematic narratives in works by male and female writers in seventeenth-century France.

Legault’s work in this book adds to the research in lesbian and queer studies, fields in which pre-18th-century French literary texts are rare.

Research interests include analytic markup, queer history, and scholarly editing.

Ruthann Lee, Constance Crompton, and Diana Carter (left to right)

Meet Ruthann Lee, Constance Crompton, and Diana Carter

Ruthann Lee

Prior to her new position in Cultural Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus, Dr. Lee (PhD, York University) taught at five different universities in Toronto and Halifax. Her research in the areas of Media and Social Activism, Anti-Colonial Feminisms, and Queer/Transgender Theory draw on her experience as a community educator and video artist.

This year, Ruthann will teach CULT 100: Themes in Culture and Identity and CULT 401F: Topics in Media Studies: Feminism, Media, and Resistance.

Diana Carter

Dr. Carter is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands and an Instructor at UBC’s Okanagan campus where is teaching Spanish language and linguistics courses.

Diana received her PhD in Spanish Linguistics in 2008 from the University of Ottawa. She has held two post-doctoral fellowships, one at the ESRC Centre for Research in Bilingualism in Wales and the second at the University of Calgary where she pursued her research interests in bilingualism, triggered codeswitching, and language acquisition.

Constance Crompton

Dr. Crompton is digital humanist with research interests in scholarly editing, queer history, and Victorian popular visual culture. She is co-director of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada, a CRWC infrastructure pilot project.

Constance joins FCCS from the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory at the University of Victoria and looks forward to teaching Digital Humanities in Critical Literary Studies and Studies in Children’s Literature in the second winter term of 2012-13.

Events of the Canadian gay liberation movement, 1964. Image courtesy of Michelle Schwartz, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada.

New program connects humanist research with mapping, encoding, and publishing

Starting in January 2013, Dr. Constance Crompton, an assistant professor in the Department of Critical Studies, will teach ENGL 212: Studies in Children’s Literature and ENGL 355: Digital Humanities in Critical Literary Studies.

Digital Humanities in Critical Literary Studies lets students construct arguments using a variety of Digital Humanities modes including visualizing, mapping, encoding, and publishing.

The class is open to all students who are curious about critical making for the digital world – no experience is necessary. Those who have enough digital savvy to send email have all the technical skills that they need to dive into ENGL 355.

Digital Humanities in Theory

The Digital Humanities is scholarship that takes place at the methodological intersection between computation and the humanities. The field grew out of textual studies, starting with attempts in the 1940s to engineer machine-produced indices and concordances.

Most digital humanists are engaged in digitizing and augmenting historical material or building digital tools to facilitate humanist research.

Digital Humanities is often project-based, relying on large teams to build digital objects, editions, and tools that preserve “core humanities concepts — subjectivity, ambiguity, contingency, [and] observer-dependent variables in the production of knowledge” (Digital_Humanities, 104).

Digital Humanities in Practice

Digitization

• Mapping the Republic of Letters
• The Women Writers Project (available through the UBC Library’s Indexes and Databases)
• The Walt Whitman Archive
• The Rossetti Archive

Tools

• The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
• Bamboo Digital Research Tools
• The Text Analysis Portal for Research

Further Reading

• Digital Humanities | Full text (PDF)
• The Journal of Digital Humanities
• Digital Humanities Quarterly

Nationally renowned poet visits campus for talks, workshops, and student advising

Award-winning Canadian poet and essayist Erin Mouré is the sixth annual Writer in Residence at UBC’s Okanagan campus. Sponsored by the Department of Creative Studies and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, this program allows 16 selected local writers to get free critiques on their work.

A prolific and multi-talented writer, Mouré has 18 books to her credit, and 11 books of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She has received the Governor General’s Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize (twice), is a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and holds an honorary doctorate from Brandon University.

In 2012, she published her own The Unmemntioable and Secession, her fourth translation of internationally acclaimed Galician poet Chus Pato. In spring 2013, Mouré’s and Robert Majzels’s translation of Nicole Brossard’s White Piano will appear (Coach House).

Erin Mouré, originally from Calgary, works as a freelance editor, translator, and communications specialist in Montreal. She also occasionally teaches Creative Writing (Poetry) at Concordia University.

Mouré will spend two weeks on UBC’s Okanagan campus from Feb. 1-15, 2013, giving a public talk on translation, holding a workshop on poetry translation, and meeting with students to discuss their work one-on-one. Mouré’s free public reading at downtown Kelowna’s Okanagan Regional Library — part of the Visiting Author Series — is Tuesday, Feb. 12, starting at 7 p.m.

Writers in the Central Okanagan are invited to have their work critiqued and to participate in a one-on-one meeting with Mouré. Appointments are limited to 16, with six of the 16 spaces reserved for UBC Okanagan students.

Neil Cadger, head of Creative Studies, and student Kevin Jesuino in University Theatre, UBC’s new performing arts space.

UBC’s Okanagan campus locale to host live theatre and entertainment events

It may be that all the world’s a stage, but students at UBC’s Okanagan campus finally have a playhouse to call their own.

Students and staff alike are excited that there is now a permanent public performance space on campus. University Theatre, which continues to double as a lecture hall, has been upgraded, renovated and turned over to students in the performance program in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies.

The makeover has been a long time coming and nobody anticipates it more than Neil Cadger, head of the Department of Creative Studies and associate professor of performance (theatre).

“Having University Theatre as a dedicated performance venue on campus is a great resource for our students,” says Cadger. “Our ability to workshop and deliver live theatre productions and entertainment provides students with a first-hand learning experience. They will immerse themselves in every aspect of live staging, from performance, to writing, designing promotional material to managing the theatre itself.”

Some of the renovations are still a work in progress. A new sound board, sound system, theatre lighting, theatre curtains and backdrop curtains go a long way towards creating a theatre atmosphere. Still to come are an interior repaint of the facility – using black and dark hues to erase the white ceiling and mute the existing earth tones.

“Now it has the look and feel of a theatre,” says Cadger.

The Department of Creative Studies has the venue booked for study, rehearsal and performances every Thursday and Friday evenings and as well as Saturday and Sunday. There have been a few events to date, like a stand-up comedy evening and University Theatre will be officially inaugurated this Saturday, Nov. 3, with an opening performance of the Vancouver Fringe Show production of Til Death Do Us Part, a critically acclaimed comedy by the Vancouver troupe Monster Theatre. A wine and cheese reception will follow the performance.

With 1,700 students living on campus, there is a ready audience for activities such as live theatre, performances, DJ nights and comedy revues, says Cadger.

More important, there are opportunities for students to be involved in every step of the theatre’s operation. University Theatre has five students currently working at marketing, technical support, programming, finance and box office, and video archiving and promotion.

“This offers us a chance to experience what the roles are – beyond being on stage – of running a theatre,” says Kevin Jesuino, a fourth-year student in interdisciplinary performance who expects to be among the first graduating class of his program.

Working with a dedicated theatre venue adds a certain authenticity to students’ work, says Jesuino.

“We didn’t have the access to a traditional theatre space, and now we have this traditional proscenium setting,” says Jesuino. “The special thing about this is that we are the first graduating class and we’re kicking off this theatre, which will be our home base over the long term.”

Cadger expects University Theatre will be a busy and popular attraction among the growing theatre and music crowd in the Okanagan.

“UBC has invested considerable effort and dollars into University Theatre and we will use it to full advantage,” says Cadger. “Our audiences will be thrilled and entertained, while our students will get a chance to show what they can do.”

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Zombies have political, social, and cultural relevance—who knew?